Ask students to all quickly find a website about global warming. They should do a fast Google search for "Global Warming". Once they find a page, they should leave it on their screens. Compare screens around the class--how many of them are looking at the same page? (The point of this strategy--hopefully--is to show that most of them clicked on the first link in the Google search return, which is what kids tend to do: search and click on the first link because it's the "best") Ask if any of them know how Google works. In other words, how do they rank the sites that they return? How do sites get to the top of the list?
Students should complete this sheet using Internet Explorer and the search engines listed above.
Have students share their findings with each other or with the class.
Summarize the explanation on this page: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167961 about how search engines rank their results. There is a good metaphor about a librarian at the beginning that might help the kids understand. Basically, search engines have algorithms that:
analyze the page for matches to your keywords
What location (near top) and how often are the key words there.
count the number of times a result is clicked on--the more clicks, the more important and the more useful the page must be.
analyzes the websites that link TO the result pages (Google does this). In other words, it checks out which sites link to certain resulting pages, and if those "link to" pages are reliable, then the resulting page must be reliable. (Wikipedia is often the first return page on Google searches)
SEARCH ENGINE QUIZ.
Ask students to all quickly find a website about global warming. They should do a fast Google search for "Global Warming". Once they find a page, they should leave it on their screens. Compare screens around the class--how many of them are looking at the same page? (The point of this strategy--hopefully--is to show that most of them clicked on the first link in the Google search return, which is what kids tend to do: search and click on the first link because it's the "best") Ask if any of them know how Google works. In other words, how do they rank the sites that they return? How do sites get to the top of the list?
Search Engine
www.google.com
www.altavista.com
www.ask.com
www.yahoo.com
www.excite.com
www.lycos.com